Professor Masa Watanabe studies climate dynamics, mechanisms of climate change and variability, large-scale atmospheric circulation, and weather extremes mainly using a numerical approach based on global climate modeling. He obtained his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2000, and after a post-doc period at the University of Hawaii, he became an associate professor at Hokkaido University in 2002. He moved to the University of Tokyo in 2007 and has been a professor in the Division of Climate System Research, AORI, since 2016. He is also a Deputy Director of the UTokyo Center for Climate Solutions, launched in 2022 for interdisciplinary research and education at the University of Tokyo. Prof. Watanabe has contributed to national and international climate science communities including as a Lead Author of Chapter 7 in the IPCC Working Group I 6th Assessment Report, and has received several awards from the Meteorological Society of Japan and Japan Geoscience Union as well as been selected to the Highly Cited Researcher in 2018, 2019, and 2021. Prof. Watanabe has served as a principal investigator of Japanese climate modeling for over two decades and bred young climate scientists throughout his career. He has over 170 co-authored publications on various topics such as climate change attribution, climate variability, and extreme weather events.